Go on. Open the door to Room 237. It’s not going to bite you. It will swallow you whole.

If you’re waiting for the maniacal laugh that would typically follow such a dire warning, you’ll have to wait a rather long time because Room 237 takes itself far more seriously than one might expect given it’s a long, detailed analysis of a horror movie.

A gift to film geeks everywhere, Rodney Ascher’s new documentary dissects the body of Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining from greasy head to gangrenous toe with an eye of extracting some mysterious truth beneath the necrotizing flesh.

The idea that The Shining is just a movie — designed and executed as mass entertainment and nothing more — is never approached, let alone mentioned.

In Ascher’s voyeuristic eye, The Shining is a mystical codex into the tortured, twisted and genius mind of Mr. Hit and Miss — a director who won undying praise and awards for classics such as 2001: A Space Odyssey and Dr. Strangelove, but also earned heaps of boos and hisses for perceived misses such as Eyes Wide Shut.

Even The Shining was seen as rather dim in its day, with Variety stating in 1979: “With everything to work with, director Stanley Kubrick has teamed with jumpy Jack Nicholson to destroy all that was so terrifying about Stephen King’s bestseller.”

Obviously, critical opinion has softened of late. The American Film Institute ranked The Shining as the number 29 chiller of all time, behind Psycho, Jaws and the Exorcist. Moreover, scholars, academics and celluloid nerds have turned readings of The Shining into a veritable cottage industry, looking deep into the folds of Kubrick’s tapestry for some hidden knot of meaning.

For one viewer, the story of the failed novelist losing his mind is really just an allegory for the Holocaust. For another, it’s a thinly veiled admission of Kubrick’s complicity in allegedly faking the moon shot.

You can look at any object and assign it meaning if you have an active imagination and a gift for gab.

Using freeze-frames, repetition, isolation shots and lots of slow-motion, Ascher points out things a casual viewer would never see: the suggestion of a giant erection in the set decoration, a changing pattern on a rug, the disappearance of a chair in the background and the brand of tinned food in the storage locker.

The operating assumption is that every single piece of production design and performance is a part of Kubrick’s elaborate and highly subversive design.

Things that may have been done to meet production deadlines and expedite lighting set-ups — such as turning the camera around to “cheat the angle” — are never considered pragmatic solutions to technical issues.

In the eyes of these Kubrick prophets, it’s all part of his divine plan. The only thing they can’t agree on is what the plan, and the larger message, may be.

While there’s a good case to be made that Kubrick was making a Holocaust movie, there’s an equally compelling argument that he was discussing America’s legacy of hate regarding First Nations, or for that matter, undermining the masculine ideal with suggestions of homoerotic desire.

The truth is, you can look at any object and assign it meaning if you have an active imagination and a gift for gab.

We are natural puzzle solvers, and so, when you consider the elements Kubrick inserted into the King story — such as the addition of the maze at the climax — we’re naturally curious about what prompted the change.

Is Kubrick tipping his hat to the Minotaur and Theseus, or is the snow-bound labyrinth just a great way to stretch out the cat and mouse finale?

There is no right or wrong in such matters because half the time, the artist isn’t even aware of what’s happening, which is why every theory — no matter how self-indulgent — is worth hearing out.

It has the same entertainment value as listening to a late-night radio host indulge his listeners on Roswell, Area 51 and 9/11. Everything sounds completely crackers, until it all makes crazy sense.

Ascher doesn’t really question his subjects about their own lives. He takes everything, and everyone, at face value — which strips his film of any “meta” meaning of its own. He’s created a vehicle that questions an artifact, without questioning his own characters or their motivation.

In the end, it feels like a clever essay — a great Powerpoint presentation that would prove very popular at academic conferences or fanboy forums.

That doesn’t mean it’s not entertaining in its own right. It is, but Room 237 may well leave you with the same eerie feeling as The Shining itself: That too much free time can lead to a very selfish brand of psychosis.